Jessica Clarke

Professor of Law
FedEx Research Professor
Co-Director, George Barrett Social Justice Program

Jessica Clarke’s research focuses on American equality law. She studies constitutional and statutory guarantees of non-discrimination based on traits such as race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion and disability. Her work has been selected for the Harvard-Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum and has received the Dukeminier Award for the best legal scholarship on sexual orientation and gender identity. After graduating from Yale Law School, Professor Clarke clerked for Judges Shira Scheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and Rosemary Pooler of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She also worked as an associate in the New York office of Covington & Burling, and spent two years teaching at Columbia Law School as an associate-in-law. From 2011 to 2018, Professor Clarke was an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. In the fall of 2016, she was the Walter V. Schaefer Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. She teaches Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law and Sex Discrimination.

Amicus Briefs

Brief of Anti-Discrimination Scholars as Amici Curiae in Support of the Employees, Bostock v. Clayton County, No. 17-1618, Altitude Express, Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. EEOC, No. 18-107 (2019)

Brief of Amici Curiae Anti-Discrimination Scholars in Support of Petitioner, Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, No. 17-370 (2017)

Research Interests

Equality law, constitutional law, employment discrimination, law and sexuality, feminist legal theory

Courses

Representative Publications

"Failed Assignments - Rethinking Sex Designations on Birth Certificates," 383(25) New England Journal of Medicine 2399 (Dec. 12, 2020) (with Vadim M. Shteyler and Eli Y. Adashi)
Full Text | WWW
"The Rules of #MeToo," 2019 University of Chicago Legal Forum 37 (2019)
Full Text | SSRN
"How the First Forty Years of Circuit Precedent Got Title VII's Sex Discrimination Provision Wrong," 98 Texas Law Review Online 93 (2019)
Full Text | SSRN | WWW
"They, Them, and Theirs," 132 Harvard Law Review 894 (2019)
Full Text | SSRN | WWW
"Explicit Bias," 113 Northwestern University Law Review 505 (2018)
Full Text | SSRN | WWW
"Frontiers of Sex Discrimination Law," 115 Michigan Law Review 809 (2017) (reviewing Kimberly Yuracko, Gender Nonconformity and the Law (Yale University Press, 2016))
Full Text | SSRN | HEIN | WWW
"Protected Class Gatekeeping," 92 New York University Law Review 101 (2017)
Full Text | SSRN | HEIN | WWW
"Against Immutability," 125 Yale Law Journal 2 (2015)
Full Text | SSRN | HEIN | WWW
"Identity and Form," 103 California Law Review 747 (2015)
Full Text | SSRN | HEIN | WWW
"Inferring Desire," 63 Duke Law Journal 525 (2013)
Full Text | SSRN | HEIN | WWW